$6/month Recurring Donation

Categories

Archives

Site Credits

Below, a list of the speeches I’ll be giving in the coming months. All are open to the public, but you’ll have to buy a ticket for the Tea Party speech. I’d wager that there aren’t many other people who in the same year will give speeches sponsored by chapters of the Tea Party, the Innocence Project, the Federalist Society, the ACLU, and Amnesty International. Might be enough to make some heads a’splode.

March 16

Georgetown Law Center, Washington, D.C.

Topic: Forensics and the Criminal Justice System

Sponsor: Georgetown Law Innocence Project

March 30

Furman University, Greenville, South Carolina

Topic: Police Militarization

Sponsors: Amnesty International and Conservative Students for a Better Tomorrow

April 13

University of Michigan Law School, Ann Arbor, Michigan

Topic: Police Militarization

Sponsors: The Federalist Society and the American Civil Liberties Union

April 16

Tea Party Summit, Washington, D.C.

Topic: The Good News About Civil Liberties, Libertarianism, and Freedom

This entry was posted
on Friday, February 18th, 2011 at 4:45 pm by Radley Balko
and is filed under Uncategorized.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.

(a) you are going to talk about law-enforcement excesses — your usual topic of discussion — to audiences that are receptive to them, but

(b) when you get to the Tea Party, which is more than a little tinged with Nixonland hostility to the dirty hippies, you are going to drop your usual topics of discussion and go with something a good deal more gauzy and uncontroversial for that crowd.

However, I could be mistaken. Perhaps the “Good News” talk will confront the Tea Partiers with some stuff they need to hear … for instance:

1) Police unions protect bad cops just as tenaciously as teachers unions protect bad teachers, and with far more dire consequences; and

2) Your right to choose your own health care should include the right to use cannabis that your physician thinks is medically indicated.

Make me proud Radley! Or else … do what you gotta do. I know compromises have to be made in order to be admitted to certain venues.

Give my regards to our upstate rivals, who were NEVER the Furman University Christian Knights, before changing their names to the Furman University Paladins. That is an urban legend. An awesome, awesome urban legend.

The Tea Party may be doing its reputation a disservice by charging for admission. Doing so is obviously consistent with the movement’s avowed ethics, but it tends to give the appearance of a political racket.

That’s not to say that there aren’t egregious rackets across the political spectrum–the hypocrisy of Cornel West’s franchise is galling–but the appearance of trying to scam the down-and-out former middle class is probably one that the Tea Party ought to avoid. It’s already associated with the likes of Sarah Palin and the Koch Brothers, which is a bit dubious.

Here in Humboldt County, California, we had a hilarious journalistic kerfuffle involving the Tea Party the other week. Tom Abate, the new editor of the North Coast Journal, our main free weekly, showed up late to a Tea Party event that he was planning to cover, argued with a doorman about press credentials (the doorman’s position: we’d have accepted yours had you been on time), and decided instead to wander the parking lot and dry-lab the portion of his story concerning the actual event using online materials about the keynote speaker. While he was in the parking lot, Abate encountered another straggler who didn’t really want to fork over the $10 admission fee. He then took the fellow out for a beer and an awkward, paranoid discussion about, among other things, the “lame stream media.”

The letters to the editor came in fast and furious. A number of them were printed the following week under the headline “Stop Abate.” My favorite line: “Is this the ‘exciting new direction’ we’ve been hearing about? If so, what other events can the North Coast Journal not attend?”

Abate had further alienated a number of readers with an article about a local casino that they dismissed as fluff and by becoming audibly angry and incoherent during a local radio interview. One reader threatened to thrust future issues directly into his stove. Incidentally, doing so is no skin off the back of a free weekly; burning a whole stack would just boost circulation.

The Journal publishes some fine reporting in some issues, but it doesn’t appear burdened by a sense of honor. During slow weeks, it reverts to a backup business model of publishing something provocatively lazy or simply provocative one week, then publishing a torrent of outraged letters the following week. Or, when it really hits the jackpot, following weeks. That was the case for its grizzly story about the local S&M scene, which carried the paper through most of last August.

I’m not interested in revisiting that sick episode, so I’ll let y’all find the relevant links on your own.